Tag Archives: Dayong Yang

Sometimes one experiences a frisson (shiver) when reading about a piece of research. Let’s see how you do with this Dec. 4, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

A bit reminiscent of the Terminator T-1000, a new material created by Cornell researchers is so soft that it can flow like a liquid and then, strangely, return to its original shape.

Rather than liquid metal, it is a hydrogel, a mesh of organic molecules with many small empty spaces that can absorb water like a sponge. It qualifies as a “metamaterial” with properties not found in nature and may be the first organic metamaterial with mechanical meta-properties.

Hydrogels have already been considered for use in drug delivery — the spaces can be filled with drugs that release slowly as the gel biodegrades — and as frameworks for tissue rebuilding. The ability to form a gel into a desired shape further expands the possibilities. For example, a drug-infused gel could be formed to exactly fit the space inside a wound.

…

The new hydrogel is made of synthetic DNA. In addition to being the stuff genes are made of, DNA can serve as a building block for self-assembling materials. Single strands of DNA will lock onto other single stands that have complementary coding, like tiny organic Legos. By synthesizing DNA with carefully arranged complementary sections Luo’s [Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering] research team previously created short stands that link into shapes such as crosses or Y’s, which in turn join at the ends to form meshlike structures to form the first successful all-DNA hydrogel. Trying a new approach, they mixed synthetic DNA with enzymes that cause DNA to self-replicate and to extend itself into long chains, to make a hydrogel without DNA linkages.

“During this process they entangle, and the entanglement produces a 3-D network,” Luo explained. But the result was not what they expected: The hydrogel they made flows like a liquid, but when placed in water returns to the shape of the container in which it was formed.

“This was not by design,” Luo said.

See the material for yourself,

Hydrogels made in the form of the letters D, N and A collapse into a liquid-like state on their own but return to the original shape when surrounded by water Provided/Luo Lab

Nature Nanotechnology published the team’s research online Dec. 2, 2012 and, unusually, the article is open access (at least for now),

Depending on your reading interests and time available, Bill Steele’s Cornell University article has more detail than I’ve provided here or you can check out the well illustrated article in Nature Nanotechnology. As these things go, it’s quite readable as you can see with the abstract (Note: I have removed footnotes),

Metamaterials are artificial substances that are structurally engineered to have properties not typically found in nature. To date, almost all metamaterials have been made from inorganic materials such as silicon and copper, which have unusual electromagnetic or acoustic properties that allow them to be used, for example, as invisible cloaks superlenses or super absorbers for sound. Here, we show that metamaterials with unusual mechanical properties can be prepared using DNA as a building block. We used a polymerase enzyme to elongate DNA chains and weave them non-covalently into a hydrogel. The resulting material, which we term a meta-hydrogel, has liquid-like properties when taken out of water and solid-like properties when in water. Moreover, upon the addition of water, and after complete deformation, the hydrogel can be made to return to its original shape. The meta-hydrogel has a hierarchical internal structure and, as an example of its potential applications, we use it to create an electric circuit that uses water as a switch.

For anyone not familiar with the Terminator movies, here’s an essay in Wikipedia about the ‘franchise’. Pay special note to the second movie in the series, Terminator 2: Judgment Day which introduced a robot (played by Robert Patrick) that could morph from a liquidlike state into various lethal entities.